away by an orator."

The Cooper Union speech was founded on a sentence from one of
Douglas's Ohio speeches:--"Our fathers when they framed the government
under which we live understood this question just as well, and even
better, than we do now." Douglas claimed that the "fathers" held that
the Constitution forbade the Federal government controlling slavery
in the Territories. Lincoln with infinite care had investigated the
opinions and votes of each of the "fathers"--whom he took to be the
thirty-nine men who signed the Constitution--and showed conclusively
that a majority of them "certainly understood that no proper division
of local from Federal authority nor any part of the Constitution
forbade the Federal government to control slavery in the Federal
Territories." Not only did he show this of the thirty-nine framers of
the original Constitution, but he defied anybody to show that one of
the seventy-six members of the Congress which framed the amendments to
the Constitution ever held any such view.

"Let us," he said, "who believe that 'our fathers who framed the
government under which we live understood this question just as well,
and even better, than we do now,' speak as they spoke, and act as they
acted upon it. This is all Republicans ask--all Republicans desire--in
relation to slavery. As those fathers marked it, so let it be again
marked, as an evil not to be extended, but to be tolerated and
protected only because of and so far as its actual presence among us
makes that toleration and protection a necessity. Let all the
guaranties those fathers gave it be not grudgingly, but fully and
fairly, maintained. For this Republicans contend, and with this, so
far as I know or believe, they will be content."

One after another he took up and replied to the charges the South was
making against the North at the moment:--Sectionalism, radicalism,
giving undue prominence to the slave question, stirring up
insurrection among slaves, refusing to allow constitutional rights,
and to each he had an unimpassioned answer inpregnable with facts.

The discourse was ended with what Lincoln felt to be a precise
statement of the opinion of the question on both sides, and of the
duty of the Republican party under the circumstances. This portion of
his address is one of the finest early examples of that simple and
convincing style in which most of his later public documents were
written.

"If slavery is right," he said, "all word